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Good evening it’s June 5, 2017 our regular Monday night class. Hello to all of you and welcome to those who are listening by way of the Internet. Today’s class is going to be a bit of a recap [so to speak] in terms of the application of Chan 101A that I've been speaking about since the beginning of the year and to apply it in our daily lives. The first thing I want to do is ask you of a component or element of the practice of Chan that is important to you to utilize. The first one is the easiest one.

Student: The Right View.

Gilbert: Right view, that's very important so we'll make sure we come back to that. Anything else?

Student: Being aware of your speech.

Gilbert: Okay, aware of your speech. Okay anything else?

Student: Maintain a clear mind.

Gilbert: Maintain a clear mind, okay.

Student: An unawareness that everything is mind.

Gilbert: An unawareness that everything is mind. This is very good. That goes with right view. All of these things are… actually you guys are going a lot deeper than I thought you’re going with just the basic stuff. You want to contribute one here?

Student: Causes and conditions never fail.

Gilbert: Causes and conditions never fail – Paticcasamuppada.

Student: Choosing mind over consciousness.

Gilbert: Choosing mind over consciousness, okay. You guys are going right through the heart of it. I thought you guys are going to be saying you know like suffering or something like that. I mean you know my list here that I have, you guys have touched on the deeper things but you haven’t yet touched on the basics. What else? I have impermanence, emptiness, suffering, ego, compassion, and wisdom. Yet what all of you were saying were pretty much all those things rolled into one, but these are different components that we use in our practice.

The idea of having the Right View is very important. Without having the right view, we really don't have a clue. As Sentha was saying mind over consciousness, we’re choosing mind and that's this awareness; using awareness to see things rather than being muddled in consciousness. Consciousness is kind of like this primordial stew of things. I was kind of thinking about it the other day driving to work. It was kind of very profound that I can think of these things especially since my Sirius subscription have expired. I was thinking about these things, about how things come into being.

One of things that I thought about was that a while back I’ve given one of my Dharma brothers, Master Chichern a fossil. It’s just a representation of a little Ammonite, the little bugs that look like giant pill bugs that’s 600 million years old and just to think about the idea of impermanence and think about this idea of time and change. I was thinking about how we came out of this primordial soup or stew, that something decided that there were going to be very big things in the pond. [You know] they were eating everything and it was about time to get out of the pond. So they started forcefully kind of learning how to climb on to the soil and they begin to sprout legs. And as they were sprouting legs, some of them sprouted big legs in the back and small ones in the front and in different things.

And then the first one out of the primordial soup grew pretty big and advanced a little bit faster than the others, the other ones seem to be essentially their next meal. I was thinking about it and going like probably the birds were thinking “Hey, this is pretty cool [you know]. If I'm to do anything, it’s probably good to fly.” So they started sprouting some kind of wings like the Pterodactyls, and then feathers because they became lighter and evolved and thought that they had it really good until they start realizing there were bigger birds there and they didn't do too well on land. And it's interesting because humans are actually more related to birds than any other ancient creatures that were there. We have more in common with them. We don’t have like our wings out to the side except we are able to maneuver. But in general, we weren’t really a prodigious species like we weren’t role killers back then and I think other animals looked at us as lunch.

It was interesting because the only thing that the humans had was a better survival instinct than others. Perhaps we’re a little more clever in terms of advancing and all those things were kind of ingrained in what we call an innate habit energy of our survival skills. And as we have these survival skills, then they begin to change where we're now comfortable. By and large, we didn't have to think too hard about our next meal. We’d still have some stale cornflakes in the pantry if we needed to get really desperate that we didn’t have to go out and clunk an animal in the head.

But as we started evolving, we started doing very interesting things. We wanted to figure out how we got here or where we’re going afterwards because we’re noticing some of our species would fall over and they’d stop moving and we didn’t know what happened to them. But what was driving us, with respect to that, what do you think when we saw one of our fellow ones dropped down? It is the idea of fear. We have this idea that we’re very very fearful. We know what that meant so he began to create all sorts of different reasons as to why we fell over or whether we went to the big beyond.

All of these things start coming into play because of our ego and our sense of surviving, not just in this lifetime but surviving beyond this lifetime. In this sense we’re just trying to make our next meal and we’re trying to figure something out. We created various forms of deities to explain that. The Indians had their deities, the other Indians had their deities, all sorts of different types of them - a pantheon of gods but some of them were monotheistic. It was very interesting but it was there for us to explain what we’re doing here and how we got here because we didn’t know so we just kind of try to sort this out the best we could. And it fit with our idea of our ego ensue this and saying that when we leave here, that we've got some place to go. It's not like we just turn into a bunch of rotting flesh on the ground. We go somewhere else, somewhere maybe into the great beyond, the stars or whatever.

But all of this was because of our idea of our egocentrism, our self-love, and our self-conceit that we had that. And often times we create our deities in our own image. As we would do this, this was part of our concerns. Later, our ego changed to be more personal to ourselves rather than [let’s say] a community ego, or a culturally ego, or a species ego, and we found ourselves competing against our own. And as we competed against our own, we start to make discriminations. Our discrimination were “You’re small and I’m big!” [you know] and “I had a bigger club!” whatever it is. “I don't like the color of your skin!” Now that probably went back pretty far.

And as we made these discriminations, we begin to formulate what our culture was made out of. Sometimes it was good things that happen in our culture and sometimes it didn't, and we became very territorial. We're still extremely territorial and I think that if aliens come up here and looking at how we cut up the earth, would be utter nonsense to them saying that “if you cross this line, there’s war!” It doesn't make sense because there's no line there on the earth that you march where this country begins and this country leaves off. But we’ve created this kind of world. We created it out of our fear, and out of wanting not to suffer, but it doesn't matter if our neighbor suffers as long as we don't suffer. Believe me it is not a political pitch tonight. I am just really seeing things just as it is and how it fits through the ages in terms of what is happening.

Why am I going through all this? From the primordial stew, to whatever's happening today in terms of territories, whether it's North Korea or South Korea, you name it? It is what makes up where we’re at today and we have to see that this all is made up not from any kind of happenstance that we just happened to do this and we happened to do that, but it's happening perfectly in accordance with causes and conditions. You could say “that's not very good! You mean mind is Paticcasamuppada –causes and conditions never fail and all these things happen like this? That's not very good! That's not what should be happening?” But it really is! It’s what happens! All of these are things we produced through body, speech, and mind, and can be seen today in how the world is and how we see the world, and how our ignorance is turning away from what's obvious. This global warming for instance, what we don't see is that there's a tipping point at some point. It's not like we can reverse it once we get to a point. It will begin to happen very quickly as it is already.

This is just one thing and again I'm not going to take an environmentalist position here today as much as just to see the things that are there and to see things that are obvious - like war is stupid, hatred is stupid. There’s nothing that distinguishes anyone of us from another person. But yet from whatever we believe in, the color of our skin, the language that we speak, the shape of our eyes, all of these things create discriminations in people. It's a very sad place. Our position as Buddhists is that we have to believe and we have to have faith that we can change things; that we can reverse this kind of a negative “I” over everyone else’s thinking. And we can. It takes time to do it but we have to do it.

Today I was talking to one of my law clerks fresh out of first year in law school. She was looking at this complaint I wanted her to prepare. She just looked at it and looked at it just doing nothing. Finally I said “This is not the way to be an attorney. You will starve. You have to start working.” I said “a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. Just start typing.” I was very compassionate with it. I said “You better start typing now!” When I went to court and I came back, the complaint was done because she had the faith that she could do it. It wasn’t a bad job. I had to kick her a little bit to get it going but once she got started, it turned out to be a pretty darn good job. And that's the way we are with our practice, is that our practice is one that we’ve got to kick it into gear. We are either the problem or the solution in this world, and we need solutions really really quickly. The way the world is going is not very good. But of course if you went back to 600 A.D., they’d probably say the same thing but it hasn't improved at all. We’re just more sophisticated in our delivery of death than before.

We can change this world but it starts with one step, and each step is a step in the right way. When we utilize Right View, compassion arises. When we utilize mind over consciousness, we’re no longer attaching to the individual self. We are very clear in what we're doing moment-to-moment-to-moment. We're clear in a way in which we don't put ourselves at the center of the universe. You have a question?

Student: You were talking about the primordial soup and how we came out of the water. We were not sentient beings then right, so there was no Buddha there?

Gilbert: We’re still sentient beings. There may not have been a Buddha around at that point in this world but there were still Buddhas.

Student: But there was consciousness then?

Gilbert: Sure, absolutely, and an ego! That's why I say this is where all of this comes from, is from the beginning, we have this innate habit energy for survival, for protection, for warmth, for procreation, we have fear, all these things came from the very beginning.

Student: So what’s the first step that make the Buddha comes or arrives here?

Gilbert: I think it's in the vow of the Buddha itself in terms of caring for things and being able to speak to… and your question are really excellent questions. Being able to speak to a bunch of trilobites would not have too much of an effect.

Student: So how good of a sentient being do you need to be to be worth converting or educating?

Gilbert: I think it's probably more like how much of a sentient being do you need to be before there is an ability to comprehend. It is not that the sentient being is not worth delivering. Even if it was Ammonite or a Trilobite or something of that nature but the ability to comprehend is vital. That's why the human realm is so important because in order to get the human realm, a realm of an ability to [let's say] reason and to contemplate is very very difficult. If you ask a snake to contemplate, the only thing the snake will contemplate is its next meal.

Student: What about hell? Is there somebody there trying to guide? (Barely audible…)

Gilbert: Yes, such as the Dìzàng Pusa, the Earthstore Bodhisattva, is there trying to alleviate the suffering. It's not just simply that Buddhism/Bodhisattvas exist solely for the purpose of delivering human sentient beings but all sentient beings where ever they're at. You have to understand because of the time and the conditions of sentient beings, some have the ability to be able to comprehend Buddha doctrines. But others, they can't.

Master Sheng Yen was once was at the beach with some of his followers and they saw this dog and they wanted to take the dog back to the temple. They go “Let’s bring him back to the center! Come on, this is such a cute dog!”

One of them said “Yes, and you can teach him the Buddha doctrine.”

Shifu said, “I have a hard enough time teaching you, much less teach the dog the Buddha doctrine.”

Even though it's a humorous statement, it's one that goes to your question, which is that there are preferable realms to be reborn into to be able to comprehend what is being said. We have from the Heaven Realm, to the Diva Realm (Asura), the Human Realm, the Animal Realm, the Ghost Realm, and the Hell Realm.

But in the heaven realm, there's no interest in practicing because of the pleasure, delight, and comfort that the heaven-dwellers have. Some of them have absolutely no form whatsoever but are just this pure contentment, but it's still the ego there. In the human realm, we kind of have one foot in the bucket of the lesser realm and one in the higher realm so we have more of a likelihood to practice and appreciate it. We suffer like the lower realm but we’re able to reason like the higher realm. So the likelihood of a Buddha coming to this realm or higher realm is more likely, other than just to try to salvage some souls as they go along. But it's difficult to bring them to that point that’s why we’re there. Not because they’re lesser, or that an Ammonite or Trilobite is not worthy of being delivered, it just that in that time they have not gotten to a point where this sentient of a being is not enough to be able to expose them to Buddhadharma. There's no easy answer with that Paloma, your question is a very good question and it’s one that one has to contemplate, one has to try to see how the Buddhas appear in the world. When I say the “world,” it doesn't mean just this world. You know, they can go, for instance Maitreya was teaching in the Tusita heaven.

Student: So in heaven, there’s no bodily form. They are pure enjoyment beings and Maitreya was there?

Gilbert: I don't know if the Tusita heaven is a form realm or a non-form realm. I've never found anything of read anything else about that. I seem to believe that they still have a body there in that heaven. It's not something that [you know] I can authoritatively bring back the recording of the speeches that are there. But all these as we take a look at it is still illusory. Everything that's there is an illusory nature. It's something that is not completely [we could say] “Oh yeah, this is real!” It is real to us. We are there but we call this apparent reality, not absolute reality. Absolute Reality, it's just mind and everything is mind. There's no separation between any of that.

Student: You mentioned a moment ago about there being our brain that draws lines and make discriminations based on fear. I guess I was having a hard time understanding how you or where somebody is above that or past that. It seems to me when you’re making discriminations, I mean there are wrong ones and there can be right ones like you say global warming is coming. We make wrong discriminations about that in society but you use that same part of your brain, the discriminating part, to say that that's not something that we want because of this and that. So it seems like no matter what, you’re stuck in making discriminations to sort out good from bad. I just want to know what you think about having actually have, that be your own method of trying to eliminate the problems with it.

Gilbert: It is a very good question because it's taken a while to get there. But we’re going exactly where I wanted to go with this class – to get you guys talking and thinking and to see that it's not in the words and phrases, but it's something deeper that you’ve got to contemplate. So we’re getting to that point.

This is very interesting because as we look at things, this is what Sentha was saying - we make decisions from awareness, not from consciousness. Consciousness is kind of an illusory default program that comes up based on habitual tendencies. So we use those habitual tendencies to make decisions for us and it is generally “ego-based” and centered around the ego: egocentrism, ego-conceit. So when we have things like that, then it goes back to that primordial type of innate habit energy for protection and survival. But now it's so corrupted and it’s only dealing with this individual organism, not the organism colony in general, but just this individual one that says “Hey, I can be richer if I disavow global warming” [not to point any fingers]. But when you look at things and you see things, then you see that this is all based on ego. This is based on this illusory ego. But there's no ego there if you look, and look, and look. In our practice of meditation, we find that there's no ego there; only habitual tendencies that arise and attach to things.

On the other hand, when we're using awareness to see things, we’re using the very Buddha-mind. This mind does not discriminate. It does not impose a moral value on things. It doesn't say “what that statute needs is this fig leaf to be put on it.” It doesn't say “either sacred or profane.” What it says is that “whatever needs to be there through body, speech, and mind, I will put there. I’m mindful of my mind, of what's coming in to my mind. If I'm having bad thoughts or good thoughts or speaking thoughts, I'm mindful of what I say” and it's very very careful. This kind of presentation today is a very tricky one. It looks like a very simple lecture but it's not because of the manner and how it can be misinterpreted. The purpose of this is to try to give you some food for thought.

But as we look at things in this way and what we do, then it too has an impact around us. All these three ways: body, speech, and mind, has a rippling effect around us so we become very aware of what we're doing. We’re very careful, very Taichi-ish in our ways of moving purposefully but naturally in what we do and natural in what we say. We’re no longer thinking as an individual ego organism that needs to protect itself from the rest, but that what can this body do to help others. Not just my species but even a donkey, a cow, a ghost, a hell-dweller, a heaven-dweller. All of these that come up, what can we do, how can we use this body in the right way.

It's in this way of using the awareness rather than consciousness that changes the whole game. It changes tremendously so that when we look at it and we say “okay why wasn't the Buddha there [you know] trying to convince the Tyrannosaurus Rex that it shouldn’t be eating the little small ones there?” It’s because it would be an ex-Buddha very quickly; “chomp, chomp, chomp” and it’s gone. So we see the world as it is clearly and see the patterns that are there. I don't profess to know exactly when the next Buddha is going to come or when the next one is checking out. Those things Buddhas know in terms of that but we can only surmise. We can only hope best wishes that these things happen to help us and guide us. But until such time, we have to use those teachings that we picked up to practice. Not to simulate a Buddha but to follow them in their practice and in doing it in this way so we see the things that arise. Any other comment?

Student: So you need a certain level of consciousness to be able to destroy your consciousness and become more aware of the awareness? I’m not using the right word, not destroy but you first need to have consciousness to be able to get rid of consciousness? You have to evolve from a Trilobite sentient being to get more, more and more ego until you suddenly realize “this is not it?”

Gilbert: We don’t get rid of the consciousness. Consciousness in itself is like the cookie we eat. The cookie doesn’t get us fat. It is we putting the cookie into our mouth one after another, after another, on a daily basis causes us to get fat. The consciousness itself is just consciousness. The thing is that nescience entrenchment, this fundamental ignorance is the ego and it is seeing that the consciousness is ultimately pure and functioning, and we become aware when this thing that we call ego, arises and attaching itself to various thoughts. Looking at it in that way, we realize mind is acting impeccably.

It's like the magnet that I talked about before running through the sand and picking up the iron filings. It’s attaching - Akusala. But if you would run just regular metal through sand that’s not magnetic, it will course through the same sand and follow the same path. The only difference is that it doesn't come out the other end all full of these iron filings. Also you can't even see the original piece of metal because it’s so attached with these iron filings and we think the iron filings to be our mind. Rather, it is just simply consciousness from the causes and conditions that have allowed the pieces of things to attach to it. But when it’s demagnetized, it is seeing as it is and all of those filings will fall away on their own because there’s nothing there to attract them. They're perfectly in their place. We only need to see things clearly; not to make things go away.

We don't make consciousness go away. Consciousness is not the culprit. It is the misuse of consciousness with the idea of the personality, ego, or a life in being, which causes the problems. And through that, whether we look at the Diamond Sutra, or the Queen Srimala's Lion's Roar Sutra, or the Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sutra, or the Tathagatagarbha Sutra, these things are there and they're looking at it and saying that there's no such thing. But because it's so deeply entrenched, it's difficult for us to get rid of it so we become even confused of what we’re getting rid of.

It's not that we’re getting rid of the consciousness. Consciousness is used by the mind to contemplate but it's not used by the mind to cogitate and produce things. Nevertheless, every single moment there’s cogitation. Even in this speech that I’m giving, I’m cogitating but dropping it immediately. As soon the words come out they’re dropped. In this way, you could say “there's no thought” to what's happening because the idea of “no thought,” it, at least in the presentation of this lecture, there's no Gilbert there so it enables the Dharma to flow. When Gilbert is present, it slows down the presentation. It makes mistakes. It doesn't see clearly.

The awareness when used properly, sees things very clearly. It doesn't have fear, the fear of “you don’t know what you’re talking about, Gilbert. You better shut up right now!” It goes “ask the question” because in the question, I have no fear when you ask those questions because those are the exact same questions I ask myself. They’re good questions. Sometimes you can’t expect a complete response by words and phrases, but you can contemplate that. That contemplation is so much more powerful in terms of bringing the mind to a stillness. In this stillness is where words and phrases leave off and this esoteric part of the practice begins to reveal mind. Any other questions? No?

I haven't gotten to all the mundane and ordinary stuff but we got into some pretty deep stuff pretty quickly. Actually that was good because I was going to say that as we look at the world we see the world from the idea of impermanence; that everything is changing - people live, people die, people get sick, and sometimes people get sick over and over again from the same thing. There’s habitual tendencies or something that's there that causes that kind of problem with the person. But we understand that health and even sickness is impermanent. Everything that we see, we see in this way.

If we understand this part, it helps us be able to settle into this world because this world is nothing but impermanent. You're young now but in two blinks of an eye, or maybe three blinks, you’ll be my age. And you go “I remember when that old guy told me that I was going to be old like him! He’s probably not alive now!” So the thing is that time changes. Everything changes, relationships change, fits change, all sorts of things that happen.

The idea is that we don't see the emptiness in everything around us. This emptiness is part and parcel of this impermanence of everything. When we understand that everything is impermanent, we understand that it also is filled with emptiness. And you go “How can it be filled with emptiness? What is that, like an air inside of a balloon?” But it isn't in this way. It is just simply that everything is connected. It's not an emptiness that’s as if you sucked out all the air out of the glass jar. Quite to the contrary, what happens is that this emptiness is just that everything has no permanent existence other than mind itself. And mind itself has no form. It is just in the way it is.

The idea of suffering is probably the one that we’re the best at. We really can suffer. Not only can we suffer but we can cause an inordinate amount of suffering to our family, to our friends, to different people. Sometimes we enjoy causing suffering to others. It gives us pleasure. You could say in basketball season, the Golden State fans are enjoying the suffering of the Cleveland Cavaliers fans. They enjoy that. But karma always changes everything, maybe not this season though. In any case, we see this suffering around us. We see why the suffering is there. The suffering is there by and large because of fear, of ignorance, misunderstanding of things, and we see this suffering in so many people. But we can help them. We don’t have to call it Buddhadharma so you can just help people and know what to say to them to bring them comfort, bring them to a point where they can accept the suffering that's there.

Of course suffering and pain are two separate things. Like if we break our foot, we have pain but we don’t have to suffer so much from it. We experience pain and we know that our body is telling us “don't even dare step on this foot because it's all messed up! And you are going to have to wait about six weeks before you put weight on it!” The pain will be there through those six weeks to remind us don't step on them. We begin to understand that it is natural. We begin understand all of these things are natural in terms of that and even whatever we cling to causes us suffering. The more we cling to something, the worse it gets. Again it's very very difficult.

Today I was settling a case, a dispute between neighbors, and my client had a well on his side of the property. The other one had an agreement that he could use the well. But he was really being very much of a nuisance about it. But we're settling the case because my client, to his glee, discovered that his neighbor was encroaching on this property. One of the conditions was get rid of the well. But the other neighbor said “I want that well! I have a right to that well!” So they’re both saying that they’re causing each other suffering. Then later on, we heard the neighbor yelling at his attorneys, which is not a good thing to do. So then the attorneys were about ready to throw him under the bus as well because they’re just tired of him.

But then the judge was very sagacious and said “What if we offer your client a few more thousand dollars?” And I went “That’s brilliant!” I said “I really don’t know if my client will take it [you know], whether his idea of his neighbor not walking on his property is worth this amount money.” And too my surprise it was. So there was a value put on the suffering; that he is willing to accept the suffering if he got paid several thousand dollars more. It's very interesting because none of this makes sense. None of this makes sense but this is how our mind works. It’s really upside-down and cuckoo when we look at things like this. The judges and attorneys were trying to sort out things that we could settle by ourselves in 5 minutes (most of the times, sometimes it’s not) if the people are reasonable. But it's very very strange!

It's like the idea of the cat and who owns the cat? Well, nobody could own a cat. How many of you had cats? You’re owned by them you know, you don’t own them; “Hey, I’m going out and don’t wait up for me. I may be back today, tomorrow, the next day, who knows [you know], but have my food ready for me when I come and you better scratch me and be happy I came back!”

Student: And the litter box.

Gilbert: “And litter box better be cleaned. If the litter box is not clean, I’m going back out again!” So the idea is… try that if you're married, you won’t be married for very long.

The idea of compassion and wisdom is where we will finish up. In our everyday life, always have compassion. It's a hard thing to do when we got some petty tyrants circling around us, people that really want to cause us destruction. For whatever reason, some of the people that have been petty tyrants in my life and people who want to get me, I have no idea why they want to do the things that they want to do to me because I've always treated them right. But karmically I guess, it's there. Other people, I know exactly why they want to get me [you know] because I wasn't a very good person, or I thought too much this way or that way but some people it's very difficult to do that.

But when we have these types of people in our life, we have to give them as much compassion as anyone else. It's not easy to do that where we say “Buddha please, I want to transfer merit to all these, except for this guy over here [you know] my neighbor that wants my well. May he drop in the well.” But if we’re able to transcend that, it literally transcends the way that you look at the world. There's a reason why it’s called “transcendence” because you're able go beyond the ego, able to go beyond this primordial survivorship protection of the ego and that you convert it to compassion. That’s pretty darn good.

If you can [you know] tune in to that station, that's enlightenment. We can't hold it for too long but that's why they call us practitioners. That all comes the wisdom, going back full circle to right view, is what generates our ability to begin the practice in this way. If we practice in this way, then we’re not too far from it. If we practice to become enlightened, we will never get there and it's a very sad way of practicing. We cannot practice in this way. We need to practice simply by lending our wisdom and giving our compassion wherever we go. Any questions? No? We’ll take our break.